There’s good news on the male-bonding relationships front! New research has found that “bromances” may be good for your health.
Researchers found that male rats who experienced moderate stress became more prosocial, raising oxytocin levels. Increased oxytocin levels encourage bonding, which leads to resilience when faced with stress.
The same effect on male-male relationships doesn’t apply to life-threatening stress, however, which makes rats avoid socialization.
Translating the link to humans
For this study, researchers put male rats in the same cage and created mild stress that made them more social and cooperative than they were in unstressed environments. The researchers compared to this human coming together after non-life-threatening events, such as a national tragedy. Once exposed to mild stress, the rats’ oxytocin levels increased and they touched and huddled more.
“Males are getting a bad rap when you look at animal models of social interactions, because they are assumed to be instinctively aggressive,” says Elizabeth Kirby, lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. “But even rats can have a good cuddle—essentially a male-male bromance—to help recover from a bad day.”
Different levels of stress
Although “normal” stress may help male-male relationships, more traumatic stress often creates the opposite effect. This can be seen in humans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as that which often occurs in soldiers who have been to war.
Like male humans with PTSD, male rats who have experienced potentially life-threatening stress often become withdrawn and antisocial. The rats exposed to this level of stress often sat alone in a corner or became more aggressive. The oxytocin receptor levels in their brains decreased when the rats were exposed to this traumatic stress, making their brains less responsive to any hormone that was present.
As another senior researcher pointed out, “This really aligns well with what you see with pathological effects of stress in humans.”
